Saying that "our society agreed" to a law pushed through Congress by Hollywood lobbyists bearing bribes is disingenuous at best. But since this isn't a political forum, I'll leave it at that.

Anyway, responding to the previous poster, Nintendo wasn't actually the first to lock out third parties from their consoles. Atari was. The Atari 7800 encryption was years ahead of its time and was never broken, though I think someone was eventually persuaded to leak the signing key a few years back. Nintendo only followed suit when they brought the Famicom to the US; the original Famicom had no lockout chip.

Here's some chewing gum and an empty roll of toilet paper. Figure it out, Macgyver.

I'm pretty sure they haven't gotten any huge lump sums from Libya et al. yet, so any interest they're getting is from their investors. But they're a not-for-profit so it's not like anyone's gonna get richer than they already are.

1. The line about how we shouldn't give kids laptops before they have food sounds great until you think about our own poor: why build inner-city playgrounds when they don't have enough to eat? why put computers in their schools when they don't have health care? (And yes, I do think American kids would benefit from the OLPC, but I recognize their whole plan is oriented towards mud huts, not tenements.)

And the answer is, there are immediate needs and there are long-term needs. There are aid organizations already attempting to provide food, clean water and health care. It would be foolish and contrary to their expertise for a bunch of MIT nerds to start yet another organization to do what the guys who've been doing it for 30 years are doing. Education is a long-term need, and the American experience with the GI Bill should tell any doubters that spending a bunch of money on education will have long-term benefit.

2. It seems unlikely to me that people will be able to barter their OLPC laptops if every kid has one, meaning most families will have what, 4 or 5 in the house. Of course, I guess they could use eBay to sell their "spares" to rich Americans.

Well, Flash 9's out in beta for Linux; I have it installed on the laptop on which I'm typing this. And it does work a lot better. Have you guys started testing it for eventual inclusion when it goes gold?

A bigger question I have about the screenshot is whether the laptops are actually fast enough to play YouTube videos.

I'd actually like some USB powered speakers, but these seem kinda bulky and it looks like their frequency response isn't much better than the 2cm-wide speaker inside my laptop.

I've been looking at tiny PC's for an embedded project lately, though, and maybe these would be good enough for something like that.... if I can get them out of their gigantic cases.

The analogy used in the article in an attempt to equate copyright infringement with stealing is invalid. Copyright infringement is more akin to walking by a restaurant, smelling something good, and then going home and making an exact replica of whatever the restaurant was serving. (Of course, restaurants' recipes are covered by trade secret law, not copyright law, so even that is a weak analogy; if you can figure out someone's trade secret without resorting to industrial espionage, you're probably okay legally.)

The fact that it's easier to copy a song is merely a sign that the business is changing. Companies who try to hang on to "a copy of one of our songs is like a physical object" will need to either adapt or find a new business.

I'll be pretty pleased if it really is mass storage compliant, but I have never bought a GBC or GBA homebrew device with its own built-in memory that didn't end up having bad blocks or sectors or whatever. With the reduction in size of this thing, I gotta think the possibility only increases. On the other hand, its simplicity just about guarantees that it will eventually become the de facto standard target for homebrew programs and games.

I have an M3 that's been really good to me, and I plan on getting a Passkey3 and some miniSD-based cart if M3 actually makes them for my DS Lite. (It didn't bother me that the standard M3 stuck out almost an inch from my old grey DS, and a centimeter won't bother me on the DS Lite.)

I'd definitely prefer real SIP over Skype, whether it's through Vonage or some homebrew thing.

Without a GBA port hardware dongle, though (as speculated in the article), I'm thinking the DS doesn't have the kick to get either SIP or Skype going.